I have a netbook acer aspire one that cannot boot directly from sd card.
I have foound complex tutorials online about installing a linux distro on a sd card and making grub boot from it like these ones:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=986126&page=3
http://www.barryhubbard.com/article....e-from-sd-card
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=97207

However this is not exactly what I want. What I need is perhaps something simpler than that. But I don't know how to do it.

I want to change the distro that I have installed on my hd. Since I already have a linux on hd I also have grub installed on hd. And I have the bootable image of the new distro I want to install in my sd card. I used image writer to write the dvd iso to the sd card and used fdisk to make it bootable. So my sd card has not a distro installed on it. Ithas the the same content as a live dvd. But in boot time the bios doesn't display sd card to grub. I entered grub command line and type ls -al and it listed hd0 and all its partitions but nothing about sd card.

So can anyone tell me how could I make grub recognize and boot the live system that is in my sd card?

Hi

can you name the current distro on the netbook and what version of grub is it?

2) Do you have a usb single sd card reader?

3) Have you tested the sd card inserted in the usb card reader in a friend's computer that allows bios boot order to recognise it as hard drive?

4) the reason I ask, is not all dvd isos are isohybrids so not all can be imaged as a bootable sd (OR) usb image

5) But if you have grub2 already on the netbook you could look firstly at booting from an iso image on your netbook's hard drive
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/ISOBoot

http://www.webupd8.org/2011/02/how-t...-easy-way.html

6) also you may like to consider a hard drive bootloader other than grub?

eg http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html

My netbook has a single sd card reader built-in it. I have linux mint 14 on it with grub 2.0. I'm using solydk in my desktop and created a customized iso of solydk using remastersys. I know that it's bootable because at first I created the iso of solydk without my personal configurations and used image writer to write it to a 2gb usb stick and fdisk to make it bootable and I was able to boot from it. But since it took almost one week to tune my personal configurations in solydk I wanted to carry them in the iso too. So I created another iso the same way I did before, but including my personal config. It size became 3,6gb an it could not fit in the usb stick anymore. I used the same procedure to create a bootable sd card but found out that acer netbooks do not boot from sd.
I tried to make grub boot the iso in the hd directly but it starts to load it and gives a message of kernel panic.
I tried to do it using unetbootin and it loads the system, displays the start-up screen of solydk but when it should load kde it stops on a black screen and do nothing else at all.
I tried to create a bootable usb with the iso of plop boot manager and of plopkexec using image writer and fdisk but none of them booted.
Sorry for all those fails, but do you still have any suggestion?
Thanks.

Hi

based on your answer and my understanding of what the real issue is, your first post is ----um ---wrong
You can boot a bootable sd card in your netbook

Your real question is remastering one of the solydk variants but http://solydxk.com/products/solydk/ is around 1.5G while the xfce edition is around 1.1G according to their website.

but they have a forum
http://forums.solydxk.com/

I suggest you post there about either how to use their iso on an SD card with persistence
---meaning accessing a separate hard drive (internal for you) for your preferencecs
------or insert an usb stick and same deal

OR

remastering completely.

I am also assuming "my personal config" means not just config files but extra packages.

The trouble is KDE is already huge----some might call it bloatware but their alternative is only 400 megs smaller.

good luck

2) if size does matter and you want to put something onto a 2G stick and all your software then you are looking for recommendations for "minimal" distros
but I also suggest now we know you have linux, the iso is to be isohybrid so you can easily image it onto a stick

I am suggesting remastersys is not that easy to trouble shoot for others. Much easy if you take an existing distro and add packages from their repo OR
compile packages using their instructions.

3) the smallest distro with already web browser etc is slitaz
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=slitaz but does not seem to have frequent updates so next is
tinycore may be better, you can put coreplus on the sd card then grab more stuff off their repo
http://www.tinycorelinux.net/downloads.html

Well, my solydk has not only kde but also xfce. I planned to use kde when plugged to power force and xfce on battery. And I also have many other applications that I installed and also some folders in my home. I wanted to take it all configured the way it is to my netbook. Unfortunately I couldn't.
I can never login to solydxk forum because they have a strict system to ban ip's accused of spam and the dynamics ip's my isp gives are often blacklisted. But probably that would not help.
I think that I have to wait a little more to see if I can have access to an usb device with 4gb or more and if I don't try to remaster solydk only with packages and without home folder.
Thank you for the help.

hmm well why not try google term Anonymous Proxy Server free

most web browsers allow you to set up a proxy in the browser

YMMV

Finally I borrowed a 16GB pendrive and was able to make the installation. The iso and the remastered system are bootable. The only problem was that my netbook boots from usb but not from sd card. And my grub alos was able to boot from an installed system but not from an iso.
Googling about acer netbooks I found several complaints that they don't boot from sd.

pls buy a single usb sd card converter

major stores sell them for around $5

retest and good luck

Thank you for the idea.
After I borrowed the pen drive I saw one usb card reader on a store. But since I was with the pen drive I finished with it.